The Center for Land Use Interpretation Newsletter
Winter 2024, #47

On Interpretation

The National Park Service and Harpers Ferry


CLUI exhibit interior
The landscape of interpretive signage was investigated in the CLUI exhibit Designing Experience: Harpers Ferry and the Interpretive Infrastructure of the National Park Service, which was on view at the Center’s Los Angeles location in the summer and fall of 2023. CLUI photo

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IS a master interpreter of the American land. Over the last century it has developed a sophisticated system for shaping our experiences at what are, officially, among the nation’s most superlative places. Park Service methodology has become the standard for place-based interpretation, and there is no better place to take it all in, than at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

Harpers Ferry was an important place in the formative years of the nation, and much of it has been reconstructed into a historical park by the National Park Service. This park provides a full spectrum of Park Service interpretive devices and mechanisms, applied to a complex pre-existing place which spans the history of the USA.

The park is also the location of the Park Service’s Interpretive Design Center, the central design bureau for interpretive projects nationwide, where the look and feel of the Park Service’s brand is generated, applied, and eventually encountered at all 429 units of the Park Service, including Harpers Ferry National Historical Park—an interpretive proving ground in its own right. ♦

SIGNS AND WAYSIDES: THE SIGN LANGUAGE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE